Automatic Transmission Ideas

Recently, I built a variation on this design. It works pretty well, but is never truly at a 1:1 or 5:1 ratio. It's still not a true CVT, but so far it's the best LEGO attempt I've seen. The designs that pop up in a YouTube search are increasingly impressive, but it looks like we still don't have a reasonable solution to this problem.

On the bright side, I've now finally bought enough traditional transmission parts to build a really nice manual transmission. With any luck I'll post some sort of hybrid approach (which isn't that dissimilar from the 1/2/D/N/R set-up most cars I've been in actually have) one of these days.